“Filmmaking Doesn’t End With Picture Lock”: Distribution Case Study of Generative Documentary ‘Eno’

The creative team shares their insights into direct distribution, plus the program design and full data set from Eno - Art House Days

A note from Dear Producer:

Last month, Distribution Advocates published this distribution case study on ENO, a generative documentary about artist Brian Eno, as part of their Film-ade Fund. The case study is both informative and inspiring and one that should be studied by all filmmakers. In an effort to the spread knowledge and and encourage experiments in distribution, Distribution Advocates has allowed Dear Producer to re-publish the case study so that it can reach as many filmmakers as possible. Thank you to our friends at Distribution Advocates for this collaboration and for supporting innovations in distribution. Sign up for the Distribution Advocates Substack for more!

A note from Distribution Advocates:

This post is the first in a series of case studies published as part of our Film-ade Fund. The Film-ade Fund gives grants for innovative experiments in the distribution and marketing of films. It’s our hope that sharing stories, and transparent data, of experimentation will help all film teams adapt new methodologies in audience-building for their own work. The Eno team received a grant from Film-ade to organize their data and present this case study, which was written by Jessica Edwards, Emily Rothschild, and Gary Hustwit.

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Introduction

At a time when the legacy film industry is telling us that documentaries are no longer watched in movie theaters, our groundbreaking generative documentary Eno has grossed over a million dollars in theatrical revenue and created a groundswell of attention, including many “Best Film of 2024” lists and a spot on the Oscar shortlist for Best Documentary Feature. Film First, our production and distribution company, has never relied solely on one strategy to get our films in front of audiences. For us, filmmaking doesn’t end with a picture lock; the distribution and release of the film is an essential aspect of the art. However, with Eno, the current distribution system posed more challenges than usual, specifically regarding the exhibition, which required us to innovate and reinvent. We are happy to share some of what we have learned here.

Eno, directed by Gary Hustwit, is about the visionary musician and artist Brian Eno and his creative processes. The film is structured to reflect Eno’s generative approach to making music. The human-coded generative software developed by Gary and Director of Programming Brendan Dawes creates infinite versions of the film, ensuring that it is different each time it’s shown. This new cinematic language was creatively successful, but would have complications for a theatrical release using the conventional industry playbook. Approaching these challenges as opportunities for Eno required a strategy centered on the film's financial success using multiple direct distribution models.

At our Sundance world premiere in 2024, we received a lot of press attention and excellent reviews, but the distribution offers were not compelling when measured against what we knew we could do ourselves. Most legacy distributors and all the streamers wanted a director’s cut, eliminating the very essence of the film’s generative approach. After the festival, our small distribution team, which includes Gary, Producer Jessica Edwards, and Distribution Consultant Emily Rothschild, worked from our studio in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York to develop a multi-pronged approach to get the film out to the broadest possible audience in a way that honored the intention of the storytelling. A direct distribution approach allowed us to connect with our audience and use our marketing resources more deliberately. We also gained more access to the audience and financial data, creating an opportunity to develop a replicable business model based on our wins and losses.

For our Eno theatrical release, we embraced strategies commonly deployed for independent documentaries, including film festival premieres, eventized special screenings, and limited traditional theatrical runs in major cities. These were essential foundations for Eno’s success and reach. Though we will share some context regarding those distribution avenues, this case study focuses specifically on the development and execution of the Eno-Art House Day program in collaboration with Art House Convergence (AHC), a coalition of independent exhibitors and theater that connects, amplifies, and advocates for its community.

The Challenges

Following Sundance, as we started developing our theatrical release strategy, a few things became apparent.

• We would face competition from legacy studios to secure week-long runs on art house screens

• We would have logistical challenges delivering a new (DCP) version of the film to multiple smaller markets and cinemas

• We had a limited media (P&A) budget for blanket advertising.

Once our special event screenings were booked and underway, we targeted three cinemas to do longer runs: New York City’s Film Forum, San Francisco’s The Roxie Theater and Austin Film Society. They all became excellent exhibition partners, but we quickly realized the technical limits of how many theaters we could book because of the particulars of the film’s delivery.

Photo credit: Gary Hustwit/Film First

To stay true to the film’s generative approach, every screening needs a unique DCP version of Eno. Instead of a typical film release where you deliver one DCP for a week-long run at a place like Cinema 21 in Portland, Oregon, we would have to deliver 21 DCPs (seven days multiplied by three screenings a day). To make that many versions of the film was an impossible feat for our tiny team and to ingest that many DCPs, a heavy lift for our partner cinemas.

To accommodate our more traditional theatrical runs, we made a small compromise. We settled on a new version of the film every day, which made space for multiple viewings over the week but wasn’t as taxing for production or the cinemas. That means we created seven unique versions of the film for a seven-day run and delivered those DCPs to each theater. For our 12-week run at Film Forum, we made a total of 84 unique DCPs.

While creating DCPs has become more economical and accessible in recent years, they still require a considerable financial and labor investment. Hence, our minimum guarantee on Eno is much higher than that of our other films. For a theater or festival to screen one unique Eno file, we set the price at $1,500 MG vs a 35% take of the box office (whichever is higher)—the split is standard, but we acknowledge that our MG is a difficult number to hit without a large theater and premium ticket prices.

But Eno is a film for and about artists and creativity, and we wanted to screen it in venues that support those ideals. So, we set out to develop a program that allowed art house theaters to access the film in a financially equitable way for both the production team and the cinemas. The program that became Eno - Art House Days originated with Art House Convergence. By creating this new distribution model to serve smaller markets, we served the original goals of Eno and established a template for other filmmakers to follow.

The Program

In late Spring 2024, we were well underway with our special event screening tour, which meant that we rented large cinemas, and Gary performed Eno “live” by creating the film in real-time from the stage of the theater and participating in a Q&A. This “eventized” screening strategy was the first wave of our theatrical rollout and we charged a premium ticket price between $25 and $40, depending on the market, and we retained 100% of the sales. Our multi-week traditional theatrical releases were still on the horizon, but we were still stuck on how to release this film wider.

In June, Gary was invited to present Eno for a burgeoning online resource group called Filmmakers Collective. FC brings together like-minded independent producers, distributors, exhibitors, filmmakers, and their allies to try to reimagine and reinvigorate the moribund independent theatrical market. After Gary’s presentation, Lela Meadow-Conner, the president of the AHC board, suggested a conversation to see how the film could be screened at cinemas in smaller, harder-to-reach markets. Eno - Art House Days became a two-day program where smaller art house cinemas nationwide screened the same version of Eno on the same day for their audiences. We didn’t set out to book a specific number of theaters, but we did want participating cinemas to be in cities with a groundswell of word-of-mouth and media, which would provide organic marketing and set smaller theaters up for success. Those territories were the U.S., Canada, Australia/New Zealand, and the UK. In partnership with AHC, we established the essential elements of the program: timing, marketing, terms, and program administration.

TIMING

Our first step was to establish the timing for the program. Eno - Art House Days naturally became a “third wave” of our theatrical release. Our limited theatrical runs were in July and August in NYC at Film Forum (12 smash weeks!), San Francisco at the Roxie (7 weeks!), Austin Film Society, Sydney Opera House, and ACMI in Australia, and a broader release in 19 theaters in the UK through Picturehouse Cinemas. The word-of-mouth and media coverage we received from these events generated a lot of interest and excitement from smaller theaters nationwide. Since the film wasn’t yet available online, our timeline could be dictated by our marketing and word-of-mouth. But we did need time to administer and market the program, so we scheduled Eno - Art House Days for three months out, early October 2024.

We determined that two days of screenings were necessary so audiences could see two versions of the film (if they chose). Once we confirmed October 8th & 10th, 2024, we worked with AHC to get the word out to their member theaters. We specifically chose Tuesday and Thursday screening dates to steer clear of studio booking requirements (a practice where theaters must provide legacy studios minimum blocks of time on the screen to show their films) and help bring quality programming to the midweek lull in cinema attendance.

We never halted one element of the release to start another, and our Art House Days program ran concurrently with our other screening strands. For instance, Eno played at the Vancouver International Film Festival the week before Eno - Art House Days, and Gary had three special event screenings leading up to the program. It became an organic schedule based on market demand, Gary’s availability to travel, and how many events we’d done in a given market. The approach wasn’t purely linear or geographical and was instead based on demand.

MARKETING

We developed materials and a booking email with AHC, who blasted it to a 1293-person list, which comprised 226 members at the time of mailing. (AHC currently has 743 participating member theaters.) The email blast resulted in 49 AHC theaters signed up for the program in October. As an exclusive perk for AHC members, we offered a recorded Q&A with Gary to screen after the film and a preferential box office split.

Simultaneously, Gary contacted his 30K email subscriber list and posted to his additional 40K social media followers to announce the program. Since most of his subscribers are not theater programmers, he encouraged them to contact local art houses to request the film. Additionally, we had assembled a list of about 40 theaters that had reached out to book the movie since our Sundance premiere, so we added them to our outreach about the program. We also pitched several media outlets and ran a story in Variety, allowing us to reach more exhibitors and other industry folks. Through this outreach, we added 25 more cinemas to the AHC participants’ list for a total of 74 theaters.

In early September, we set up a Zoom call with participating theaters to discuss how to market the documentary better. We focused on creating partnerships with local record stores and music organizations, which were key to finding Eno fans and people interested in music films. We encouraged cinemas to offer ticket giveaways with local music shops and radio stations in exchange for email and social media outreach to their subscribers. Sometimes, we sent posters to the most influential regional music stores before screenings, but on a limited basis because of the expense. As we approached the screening dates, Gary did additional social media outreach with giveaways offering soundtracks to the film on vinyl and CD, tagging all the participating cinemas.

DETERMINING TERMS

Typically, we’ll set a minimum guarantee (MG) fee for our conventional documentary releases. That means we get paid a set fee no matter how many people attend the film—and if the events do well and sell out, we see a percentage of the theater’s net box office overtop of the MG fee. The theater recoups the MG off-the-top and then splits the ticket sales 35% to us and 65% to the theater.

For Eno, our one-off and festival bookings MG is $1500, much higher than our previous films because of our assumed production costs for creating a new version of the movie for each screening. This MG fee is extremely cost-prohibitive for smaller theaters with lower ticket prices and fewer seats to sell. This was the main reason we developed the Eno-Art House Day program. AHC suggested using a sliding scale,setting the MG to the theater’s capacity. A 35% split is standard for most regions in the U.S. Tying the MG to capacity was an excellent contribution from AHC and became the bedrock of our financial terms.

Fees for the program were calculated this way:

Theaters with 100 seats or less: $250 MG vs 35% (One showing)
Theaters with 101-200 seats: $350 MG vs 35% (One showing)
Theaters with 200 seats or more: $500 MG vs 35% (One showing)

Note about box office percentage: The 35% rate is applied *only* to AHC members. We charged 40% for other non-member theaters to incentivize cinemas to sign up for membership with AHC.

We required the MG fee upfront, which was paid through a link on our website, Oh You Pretty Things, which allowed us a pool of funds to pay for the production and administration costs for the program. If theaters wanted to screen Eno on both days, they paid the MG twice.

RESULTS & FINANCIALS

The first iteration of Eno - Art House Days was a success. It satisfied our goal of sharing the film outside of major cities and had the exciting side effect of supporting local art house cinemas with sought-after programming. Our October screenings had a total of 74 participating theaters, which screened the film for 8127 people worldwide with a gross box office revenue of $89,558.75 with a filmmaker share of approximately 37.5%, resulting in a gross take home of $33,584.53 for two days/two screenings. The breakdown is as follows.

DATA SET

Please click through to see our full data set and theater-by-theater breakdown of box office totals, audience attendance, and theater capacity percentages for our Eno Art House Day program in October 2024.

Conclusion

Eno - Art House Days was a great success, satisfying our intended goal of bringing the film to smaller markets and art house cinemas. We were so happy with the results in October that we organized another set of dates in January. In the intervening months, Eno was shortlisted for a Best Feature Documentary Academy Award and our additional dates in January became the foundation of our AMPAS screening program, supplemented by 3 paid-for screenings, allowing a diverse and low-cost alternative to setting up private events for Documentary Branch Oscar voters. For the second iteration of the program, we simplified the accounting, we only had one set of terms for all the theaters at 35%. The additional 5% take-home on a small group of theaters that were not AHC members was not worth the administrative resources on the back end. With the success of the January events, we’re considering monthly Eno - Art House Days programs.

One issue with operating outside of the legacy distribution system was how the substantial success of our event-based release strategy could not be included in mainstream box office reporting in the Hollywood trades. Since box office reporting exclusively focuses on money earned through traditional theatrical bookings and publishes those numbers in outlets like Box Office Mojo and Numbers, which the trades in turn draw from, it excludes income from event-based screenings and other one-off cinema partnerships. For Eno, this was a huge differential of more than $400,000. In the U.S., our traditional theatrical release of week-long runs generated $298,989, whereas the total revenue was $731,135. To boost the perception of theatrical documentary success, we would advocate a reimagining of this type of reporting that is skewed to a large studio model.

We’ve also begun including total attendance in our internal reporting, and advocate for this to become a new standard. This could more precisely illustrate the interest audiences have in attending cinemas, doing away with the myth that people haven’t returned to theaters after the pandemic lockdowns.

We also want to emphasize that we worked really hard to find our audience. For any film requiring niche distribution, especially one with a limited P&A budget, the team should have clear goals and an understanding of how much labor goes into marketing. It also takes time. Our team’s main focus was distributing Eno in theaters for the 12 months after the world premiere of the film. The online streaming premiere was a secondary focus initially until we announced our 24-hour streaming premiere on the one-year anniversary of our Sundance premiere.

The most valuable takeaway from Eno - Art House Days was that better partnerships with theaters and eventizing the cinema experience can benefit filmmakers and exhibitors alike. The program was just one aspect of our overall strategy that we executed with a great team of people willing to create new ways of thinking about getting our film in front of audiences. But these strategies are possible to execute for any film as long as the team knows where to find their audiences. We hope the lessons we learned from Eno - Art House Days will encourage filmmakers to imagine a robust release for their films and enliven further experimentation in theatrical distribution.